So humans are going to Mars.
And soon.
Lots of them.
SpaceX could be going as soon as 2026,
NASA and China by the 2030s
and India, Russia and the United Arab Emirates
are all planning on it too.
But what happens when they all get there?
How can we actually survive?
Well, some lucky scientists have already been there.
OK, OK, not really.
They're living in a Mars simulation
right here on Earth
to troubleshoot what could go catastrophically wrong
when they do go to Mars.
It's time to explore the unexplored.
OK, let's break this down
into two key challenges we're going to need
to overcome if we go to Mars:
the physical and the psychological.
Let's start with the physical.
In many ways, Mars and Earth are quite alike.
It has a similar dry land mass,
volcanoes, craters and its days
are just 37 minutes longer than ours.
What would you do with an extra 37 minutes?
But that is where the similarities end.
And it's the differences where the problems start.
Gravity is just 38% of that on Earth.
It means that you can jump higher,
but you'll lose muscle mass.
Imagine Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson
training his chest every day
with an 100 kilo bench press
to maintain that impeccable physique.
Suddenly, you land on Mars,
and all that's available is a 38 kilo weight.
Over time, his chest is going to get
weaker and weaker, and it's a similar situation
for astronauts going to Mars.
Then there's the atmosphere,
which is incredibly toxic.
It's around 95% carbon dioxide.
And to make matters worse,
Mars is bombarded with radiation and-
you get the idea.
Mars is extremely dangerous.
But luckily, there's a team of scientists
who are actively trying to resolve these problems
before we get there.
So when we talk about Mars simulations,
what we're doing is we are trying to mimic
the surface phase of a human robotic Mars mission.
There's a million things that can go wrong.
So when we think about Mars,
we're talking about a world that is up to
380 million kilometres away from the Earth,
which happens to be about a thousand times
the distance to the Moon.
And so it's probably a thousand times
more things that can go wrong.
Well, we learned through our missions,
it's not only the big things that
are challenging, it's the small things.
Think of being in a spacesuit.
Despite the air condition, you start to sweat,
but you cannot scratch your nose in the helmet
obviously, so little things like
a little piece of foam where you can simply
rub your nose into it and make sure
you don't sneeze inside a helmet,
which is a very bad idea, by the way,
is a little thing that doesn't sound very glorious,
but it's the things that make your work easier
and really making sure that you have
gone through the ins and outs of
those little details can be a game changer.
We have been doing those Mars simulations for
13 campaigns now, since almost 20 years now,
and there's literally hundreds of experiments
we did, and many of them went wrong
or did not turn out the way
like we expected them to do.
And so we live and breathe
the mantra of fail fast, fail cheap,
and have a steep learning curve
because that's where you get better.
We died many deaths.
Simulated, of course.
So gravity, atmosphere and radiation
are not actually the main concerns.
These are the big things
that we already know about,
that we can create technology
to help mitigate them.
It's the small things
that we don't know about yet.
They're what could kill you,
and there's a lot of them.
So far, the answer to most of
the physical challenges has been
better technology and better spacesuits,
but physical survival is only part of the battle.
The team are also pioneering
incredibly advanced psychological studies
to figure out who will be
the best humans to go to Mars.
We think that there is no such thing as
a 'born' astronaut.
When we select analog astronauts
for the Austrian Space Forum
this has been done very, very carefully.
It's a multi-month process we're evaluating.
We just did a recent count for the last class.
637 individual parameters,
anything from your cholesterol level
to the length of your pinky finger
and your ability to entertain little children
and psychological factors and so on.
You're much more looking for team players
who are outstanding when it comes to health,
but they also have technical competence.
But at the same time,
who are also to display social warmth.
They know how to tell a joke in the airlock
at the right time.
They know how to cook.
They know how to do a magic trick.
They can play the guitar.
They can also set up, settle down a broken leg or something.
We are not looking for psychological clones
of each other,
but they need to complement each other.
And so we're looking actually from
the anthropometric point of view,
we're looking for the average Joe, the average Jane.
Or an average Josie?
So we have people who, in the beginning,
who have high technical competence.
But then the road doesn't stop here
because you need to continuously monitor
the activities throughout the mission.
That's exactly what we're doing with our simulations.
For instance, in a previous experiment in 2018
in Oman, we had an artificial intelligence
machine learning algorithm,
who was looking into the pitch of the voices
when people talk to each other.
And we know when people are in stress,
their average pitch shifts just slightly
above the average.
Or, for this mission in Israel right now,
we had one of the experiments with-
fantastic experiment.
The astronauts would have locators so we could
produce heat maps where the astronauts
would congregate throughout the mission
or also relative heat maps, how much
physical spacing they have in between them.
If you don't like somebody, you tend to
increase the distance, for instance.
And so we're looking at the methods that tell us,
here's a stressful situation emerging before
the people would realise it and magically,
then everything goes according to plan.
And so it's about keeping them functional,
by keeping them happy, by feeding them well,
you know, 'no food, no fight',
but also making sure they don't smash each other's heads
before leaving the lunar orbit.
So with the right training,
technological development and people management,
Dr Groemer believes that we can definitely
survive on Mars.
But so far we've only been focusing on
a finite scientific mission.
Go, survive for a bit, and then return.
And that's understandable given how many
risks there are for even doing that.
But this hasn't stopped people
from dreaming even bigger.
Elon Musk has famously said that
we're going to Mars for good
to become a multi-planetary species.
Some scientists have taken this and come up with
some scary, speculative solutions
to explain how we might survive.
One of those is through mutations.
The high levels of radiation on Mars
could cause our bodies to change,
and it's possible that some of these changes
might actually help us survive.
It's hard to predict how quickly this might take
and the effects that it might have,
but some scientists say that it could take
just a few generations.
We could see changes in our skin tone
to deal with the radiation.
Could we go green?
Our bone density might alter to account for
the lack of gravity, and we might not even need
our immune systems because we'll be living in
such a sterile environment.
All of this is only relevant if we're actually going.
Will we really ever be setting off to Mars for good?
Yes, we will. I can give you this in written.
It's only a natural process.
I think at the core of our beliefs
and our heart and our DNA,
we are a migratory species.
Our children and grandchildren will
look up to the sky, to the moon and see
little dots of light out there on
the lunar surface, saying 'We are out there'.
It's a statement to the universe.
And the same will happen to Mars and the worlds beyond.
It's just a matter of time.